Exploring self-efficacy beliefs in symbiotic collaboration with students: an action research project

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a participatory action research project in which teacher-researchers, student-researchers and student-subjects collaborated on a research project in a working-group format to investigate constructs related to the translator’s psychological ‘self’. The pedagogical approach adopted for managing the working group, based on social constructivist principles and a view of knowledge development as an emergent, collaborative process, was found to have boosted the students’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding themselves as researchers, as the results of a focus group analysis revealed. Moreover, through the symbiotic collaboration between teachers and students in the working group, a preliminary two-section questionnaire for measuring students’ self-perceptions as translators was validated over the course of the project, thus enhancing the value of this research tool for studying learners’ self-efficacy beliefs. A key focus of this chapter will be on a shift in emphasis from ‘translator training’ and ‘training the translator trainer’ towards ‘translator education’ and ‘educating the translator educator’.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative learning
• authentic research project
• emergentist pedagogical approach
• translator’s psychological ‘self’
• action research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Students’ perceptions of the multi-directional learning approach adopted

• 8. What do you think of the educational approach adopted? Why? Has it facilitated learning? How?

Students’ perceptions of the impact of their experience as part of the working group on their careers as translators and/or researchers:

• 9. Do you think that your experience in the working group project may help you in your career as researchers and/or translators? Why? If so, how?

• 10. Do you have more confidence in your research skills now than at the beginning of the working group project? Why? What and/or who (teachers, peers) has contributed to that? How?

Notes

1. Translation Psychology is a sub-discipline of Translation Studies (Jääskeläinen 2012; Bolaños-Medina 2016) which entails the study of translators-in-action as complex individuals functioning as holistic entities. It thus deals with the underlying emotional, cognitive, behavioural and social factors at play, as well as their interactions with the translators’ professional environment and with other agents participating in this environment (Bolaños-Medina 2016, 59).

2. See Haro-Soler (2019a) for a review of the main studies performed on this topic and on translator’s self-confidence.

3. According to Fink (2003, 31–33), the validity of a scale refers to how well it measures what it is intended to measure. There are different types of validity, such as face validity, which involves a ‘casual assessment of item appropriateness’, or content validity, ‘a subjective measure of how appropriate items or scales seem to a set of reviewers who have some knowledge on the matter’.